Over a nearly 40-year career in movies she has played the tormented actress Frances Farmer and the tragic country star Patsy Cline, portrayed manic-depressives and murderers, done Shakespeare and Balzac, worked for Fosse and Scorsese.

But which is the film she'll really be remembered for?

"`Tootsie,'" Jessica Lange says. "When I think on all the films I've done — and many of the parts were great, the filmmakers, the experiences — that's the one that will remain a classic. It's just a brilliant piece of filmmaking. great script, wonderful actors - it holds up beautifully. I'll catch it on TV here and there, and it always delights."

Of course, the 1982 film also has a special meaning for Lange — it won her an Academy award, her first, as best supporting actress. (She also got a second nomination that year for best actress, for the dark biopic "Frances.") But "Tootsie" showed who she was professionally — someone who took risks, who wouldn't stay safely in a box.

For example, the actress — who turns 65 in April — has had a great late-career resurgence thanks to TV's creepy, campy "American Horror Story." Yet rather than use the time between seasons to knock off a nice paycheck part, Lange turned to a small indie and 19th-century realism, for a new version of Zola's proto-noir "Therese Raquin."

In 'In Secret,' Lange is Madame Raquin, a mother whose overpowering love only leads to tragedy for allROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS

Opening Friday, "In Secret" stars Lange as the domineering mother who — disastrously for everyone — pushes her son into a loveless marriage with her niece. Wide-eyed Elizabeth Olsen plays the unhappy Therese, with Tom Felton costarring as her inconsequential husband. But it's Lange who gets the biggest acting assignment when, late in the film, her character suffers a paralyzing stroke — forcing her to act out the most complicated feelings with only her eyes.

"That was such a huge challenge as an actor," Lange says. "Because, really, you rely on your voice and your body to explain and illuminate a character. To not be able to have any of that was actually kind of great. How do you express these huge, tragic emotions with words? Without movement? That was exciting. And those were the kind of challenges I loved about acting to begin with."

A world of let's-pretend
Lange grew up in Minnesota, mostly in small-town Cloquet, with a mom who stayed at home and a travelling-salesman dad who drank too much. Right from the start, the little girl's imagination provided a safe and wonderful escape.

"I think my love of acting harkens back to that innocent kind of child thing, the world of make believe," she says. "There's something so wonderful about being able to just live in that world. More than anything, that's what the appeal of acting was for me... I think it is for most actors. It's not about what you learn in class or how you can control your voice — although all those things play into it — it's about what comes right out of your imagination."

Still, Lange did go to class, did study, first art and photography at home, then mime in Paris. She married (and later divorced) a Spanish photographer, she travelled, she came back to New York and did some modeling — and, in between, waited tables at the old Lion's Head Tavern in the Village. But then one of her shoots caught the eye of flamboyant producer Dino De Laurentiis, who wanted a fresh face for his bigger-than-big movie, "King Kong."

And so Lange became the blonde in the monkey's paw.

Monkey business: Lange in her eye-catching debut in 'King Kong'

The film was a huge hit - and, also, a huge joke, from its occasional man-in-a-monkey-suit effects to Charles Grodin's twerpy malevolence as an oil-company villain. (A particularly hirsute Jeff Bridges is in there, too — as is the still-new World Trade Center.) Although Lange won the Golden Globe award for "New Star of the Year" — well, that was the same prize they later gave Pia Zadora. It would be three years before Lange did another movie, appearing as Angelique, the angel of death in Bob Fosse's dazzling "All That Jazz."

"She was a cipher, though," Lange says of the character. "It wasn't a fleshed-out part, wasn't anything other than this kind of fantasy of Bob Fosse's. What really turned it around for me was 'The Postman Always Rings Twice.'"

That 1981 film, a remake of the '40s classic, starred Lange as an unhappy wife who lures drifter Jack Nicholson into steamy sex and a murder plot. ("It's a funny thing now," says Lange, "because James M. Cain said he based the original novel on 'Therese Raquin.'") But what MGM had only stylishly hinted at, this version made explicit, with sweaty, knock-over-the-furniture love scenes.

"`Postman' was the first opportunity I'd been given to play a character as complete as she was, and in a story as complex as that was, and I'm always grateful to Jack and (director) Bob Rafelson for taking that chance with me," Lange says. "It really led to everything, because the man who was editing 'Postman' ended up directing 'Frances,' and wanted me for that. And it was on 'Frances' that I got the offer to do 'Tootsie.'"

At first, Lange was unsure. She was starring in a serious drama; this was a supporting part in a farce.

"I remember being on the set and saying to Kim Stanley, my favorite actress of all time, 'They want me to do this little comedy,'" Lange recalls. "And she said 'Do it — you need to get this character out of your head altogether, a comedy's the best thing you could do.' And when 'Frances' and 'Tootsie' both came out at the same time — well, that was what made everything take off."

In 'All That Jazz,' Lange appeared as a mysterious angel of death

Lange won the Oscar for "Tootsie" (and won the heart of co-star Sam Shepard on "Frances," beginning a relationship that lasted until 2010, and produced two children; she already had a child from Mikhail Baryshnikov). And soon Lange embarked on an incredible career surge that would include "Crimes of the Heart," "Cape Fear" and, in 1994, a second Oscar, for her heart-breaking performance as an emotionally fragile military wife in "Blue Sky."

"Oh, that was a wonderful decade," Lange says, and then laughs a little. "It won't be repeated!"

It was a great period for a lot of great actresses — Sissy Spacek, Glenn Close, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep (whom Lange beat out in a hotly contested casting battle for "Sweet Dreams"). And yet even in that crowded field, Lange stood a little apart, with a range that included both grounded-in-character comedy and searing drama, and an image which contrasted a warm womanly sex appeal with a fragility only just hiding behind wide-set brown eyes.

After the second Oscar, though, things slowed. Lange lost that heat, that drive, that interest. Other concerns moved to the foreground. Some of that was welcome — her three children, her mostly off-the-grid life with Shepard. Some of it was not, as she struggled sometimes with self doubts and dark moods. Although Lange continued to have triumphs — often on stage now — she worked less.

"You hit a certain age and the parts begin to get sparse, and eventually they thinned out to such a degree I lost focus," she says frankly. "I made bad choices, or I'd take something and ultimately get distracted. And you couple that with a time when my children were growing up and, you know, they didn't want to travel anymore like a troupe of gypsies — 'All right, everyone, pack up the dogs and off we go so Mom can make a movie.' So it was harder and harder for me to go away, or be comfortable if I were away. Things were dormant for a good decade."

It was the HBO movie "Grey Gardens," she says — with Lange playing the mad old matriarch Big Edie, living in less-than-genteel poverty — that turned it around five years ago.

"Something came back alive for me with that," she says. "Grey Gardens' rekindled everything I'd loved about acting to begin with, and opened me up again to the possibilities."

One of the brightest opportunities turned out to be television's "American Horror Story." Creator Ryan Murphy's unusual concept was to keep much of the same cast, but take on a different tale each year. So far Lange has played everything from a sadistic nun to a modern witch; she'll be back next season, along with Kathy Bates and Angela Bassett, in a story Murphy has said will be set in 1950.

Nun's the word: The second season of 'American Horror Story' gave Lange one of her meatiest parts yet FX

As to what the new tale will actually be, "Ryan keeps things very close to the vest, so I don't know," Lange insists. "Although apparently I'm going to have a German accent!"
What's also helped re-energize Lange is just how fast the whole process is on a TV show, coupled with a kind of "creative chaos" in which actors are sometimes getting scripts only hours before the shoot.

"It's been very illuminating, because as an actor, you prepare, you figure out your voice, or this and that; it's this deliberate, intellectual process," she says. "On television, though, there's this velocity — it's not like some big movie where you're sitting around all day in your trailer, you have to be quick on your feet and hit the floor running. So in the end you just rely on your imagination, which I love anyway, and try to be in the moment, which it's really all about."

N.J. NEWS ON THE GO

Our redesigned mobile site has quick page loads and app-style navigation, and lets you join the conversation with comments and social media.

Visit NJ.com from any mobile browser.

What it also often seems to be about for Lange is exploring dangerously damaged, yet still struggling women — the tragically obsessed mother of "In Secret," the bizarre characters of "Grey Gardens" and "American Horror Story," the broken heroines of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill she's played on stage.

"The characters that appeal to me always seem to be on the verge of madness — which I think says a lot!" she adds with a laugh.

But what she's finally learned, over years of playing these people in the shadows, is how to step back into the light.

"I wasn't always able to," she admits. "Frances haunted me for a long time; the same with Blanche DuBois and Mary Tyrone. Diving down into the depths and then walking away in the morning - that was hard for awhile. But it's easier now... And the work itself is absolutely cathartic. I've always been of the superstition that things come to you at a certain time for a purpose; that you should honor that, and think of roles as gifts. Not all of them, of course; some are pure trash, and you do them anyhow, for other reasons. But the ones that really move you to another level of experience, those are truly rare opportunities. And I think they're the ones you really have to embrace."